Zod Wallop (11 page)

“I hate rain,” he would tell Harry. It would be a sunny day. Harry would agree, cautiously, that rain could be unpleasant.

“I am being watched constantly,” the man complained.

“Ah,” Harry would say, as Marlin Tate prowled around the room. The man made Harry more nervous than any of Harwood’s certified psychotics.

“I’m depressed,” he told Harry, sitting on Harry’s bed and smoking a cigarette (which was against the rules, but Harry didn’t mind). “I should be happy. I’ve got a lovely wife, enough money for a lifetime, and my work is coming along. I don’t have any right to be depressed. I mean, you have legitimate cause…daughter drowned, that sort of thing…but why should I be in such a funk? I just want to transcend this”—he waved a hand around the room—”this clutter.”

He paused, looked up at Harry and said, “Are you acquainted with your fellow patient Raymond Story?”

“Yes. We are in group together,” Harry said.

“What do you make of him?”

“I don’t know.”

Marlin Tate nodded, as though this were a sharp character assessment. “Yes, well. He says you are his best friend.”

Harry blinked, said nothing.

“Schizophrenics come up with some fascinating delusions.  He believes he died when he was eleven, and that now he is living in another world.”

“Yes, that’s a common topic with Raymond.”

“That’s the bond with you, of course.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “Bond?”

Tate stood up. “Maybe I’ve just got the flu or something.”

“What bond?” Harry asked.

The pharmacist looked at Harry. “He’s convinced that you crossed over too. Your daughter drowned, and it’s you that slipped into this alternate universe.”

Harry nodded. Alternate universe. Raymond had that right. This was manifestly not the world Amy had inhabited.

“Have you experienced any numbness in your extremities?” Tate asked, changing the subject—or perhaps not.

“No,” Harry said. “My extremities are fine.”

“We want to keep an eye out for side effects. Some of these medications vary considerably in their effect on the individual. No all-purpose elixir, I’m afraid.” He frowned. “No bad dreams?”

“No.”

Unless, of course, the Botwobble business had been a dream. That was the rational explanation for what had happened the previous night. Unfortunately, Harry was fairly certain it wasn’t a dream.

It figured that Raymond would own a Botwobble. The last thing Harry wanted to see was this miserable marketing spin-off from his book
The Bathtub Wars
, so it was almost a given that Raymond would own one.

Botwobbles were small, balloonlike animals that surfaced in bathtubs. They were cheerful, winsome creatures, as playful as otters, delighting small children whose parents would never have been able to get their progeny into a tub were it not for the prospect of playing with these good-natured water babies.

Botwobbles and humankind coexisted peacefully until a villainous entrepreneur discovered that a Botwobble, rubbed briskly all over the face, made wrinkles vanish. This rejuvenating process caused the poor Botwobble to dwindle to nothing, uttering a pathetic whimper all the while.

Hard-hearted dowagers were indifferent to the creatures’ plight. Botwobbles were relentlessly pursued so that vain humankind could recapture youth.

The book had a happy ending. Children refused to bathe without their playmates. Civilization foundered as millions of dirty, bad-smelling children brought social commerce to a halt. The lesson was obvious: it was dangerous to fool with nature’s delicate balance.

All well and good except for the miserable yellow rubber Botwobbles that Harry had, in a moment of weakness and financial need, allowed a toy company to license. They looked much like Harry’s drawings of them, long, sausage-shaped critters with broad, goony smiles and bulbous eyes. But the noise this toy made when squeezed was a shrill, irritating whistle that sounded particularly plaintive when bathwater had been sucked into the thing. Amy had owned a Botwobble, and she had been skilled in making it elicit a dismal, asthmatic squeal that could disrupt the brain’s ability to think any coherent thought.

Raymond owned one, and he carried it everywhere, squeezing it absentmindedly when he was agitated. He even took it to group, but it was quickly banned from that environment.

Harry had been working late on
Zod Wallop
. Usually, when he wrote and illustrated a book, the drawings propelled the words. Then the words would surprise new drawings. The process was magical and energizing.

Not so with
Zod Wallop
, which was powered by despair. It hurt to write it, creating real physical pain, migrainelike headaches that could distort his vision. The pain didn’t stop him, but fighting it was exhausting.

When the drawing in front of him wavered, when the sepia colored dungeon became a meaningless blur, he got out of bed and drifted into the rec room just in time to see Melanie Jensen hit Raymond in the face with a Ping-Pong paddle.

Melanie, a teenager as pretty as she was bad-tempered, turned away from Raymond, who was sobbing in that helpless, sagging fashion that somehow fails to inspire compassion, producing, instead, contempt. Raymond’s nose was bleeding copiously, darkening his mustache.

Melanie glared at Harry. “I told him not to turn the TV off,” she said. “He’s not the only person in the world and just because he doesn’t like TV doesn’t give him any right to turn it off.” She flounced back to the sofa, grabbed up the remote, and snapped the television back on. David Letterman, bored and mean, blinked into lurid focus. He was insulting a guest, a celebrity who might, in fact, have been another talk-show host. A third person sat on the couch, a child dressed in a metallic jumpsuit and wearing what appeared to be a brassiere on his—her?—head.

Harry snatched the remote from the end table and clicked the television off.

“Hey!” Melanie growled. “What the fuck!”

Harry leaned toward her. “Raymond’s right. That stuff will rot your brain and make your ears bleed.” He turned away. Raymond had left.

“Hey, give me my remote.”

“Sure.” Harry handed her the remote. Melanie sat on the couch, punching the remote at the television which refused to revive. “Shit,” she muttered. “Shit.”

Harry left the room, the batteries in his pocket.

Back in his room, he lay on his bed and closed his eyes. He never undressed for bed, never crawled under the bedcovers, never turned the lights out. The staff was always on him about that, but they didn’t understand. He had to take sleep by surprise. Preparing for bed simply alerted insomnia, brought all the busy thoughts, the renegade remorses and guilts and recriminations. The trick was just to close his eyes. Sometimes he slept.

Not this time. This time, as soon as he closed his eyes, the hysterical, repetitive whimpers of a Botwobble accosted him. He closed his eyes tighter, and the noise increased. Finally, he got up and went down the hall to Raymond’s room.

The door was open.

Raymond lay propped amid pillows on his back in a rumpled bed, the trashed warren of some animal that fed on bags of Cheetos and cream soda. He had stopped crying but his eyes were wet and there was dried blood in his mustache. He still wore his brown suit jacket, now rucked up behind his head like a cape. His blue dress shirt had worked out of his pants to reveal his smooth, white belly. His bare feet stuck out of his trouser cuffs with the starkness of true tragedy. Although, Harry reminded himself, nothing really tragic had happened here. One crazy person had gotten in the way of another crazy person, that’s all.

The shriek of the Botwobble filled the room. It did not come from the bed, where Raymond lay as still as a drugged Buddha. The sound seemed to come from the far corner of the room, an unlighted corner beyond a small, snack-cluttered writing desk. Harry edged cautiously into the room and peered into the corner. There it was. The little yellow toy, Raymond’s precious Botwobble, bounced on a folding chair, expanding and contracting hysterically, whistling its thin lament to an indifferent universe.

Harry stumbled backward, banging against the door.

Raymond blinked and sat up.

“Oh,” Raymond said. “Gosh.”

The Botwobble stopped squeaking, rolling off the chair and hitting the floor with a final eek before resuming its inanimate status.

“That Melanie is really mean,” Raymond said, rubbing his eyes.

Harry said nothing. He stared at the Botwobble.

He closed his eyes, accosted by a sudden, vicious vertigo.

When he opened his eyes, he was in the darkness of the car.

Is it gone
? he wondered. 

The sky was beginning to lighten—my God, was it dawn?—and he could see Emily, her eyes closed, her breathing slow and regular. He reached out and touched her shoulder.

Her eyes opened instantly.

“It’s okay,” Harry said. “I think it’s gone.”

He patted her shoulder, then said, “I’m going to start the car. Let’s see if we can find Raymond and the others.”

Harry climbed into the front seat and slipped behind the steering wheel. He turned the key in the ignition and the engine caught immediately. He looked back over his shoulder and smiled at Emily. “Here we go,” he said.

Helen’s car was a big luxury cruiser. Accustomed to his own small, responsive Mazda, Harry found it took some getting used to. It was like driving a boat.

He turned right onto a dirt road and bounced over deep ruts and the prehistoric prints of tractor wheels. Harry looked in the rearview mirror to see if Emily was still upright. She was. Her eyes were wide and unreadable.

A busted fence jittered past on Harry’s right, silver planks brought down by neglect. A large black crow shouted from a leaning fence post before heaving itself into the air and flapping off across the field toward the trees.

Harry could see the sun as though it were burning fiercely behind gray cheesecloth. He could feel the heat there too, preparing to roll out another suffocating carpet of dust and burning chaff.

The field was empty. They came to the trees. Here the dirt road was reclaimed by weeds. A hundred yards into the forest, the road grew confused, opened onto a wide, grassy circle as though attempting to get its bearings, shot narrowly to the left, and ended abruptly in a snarl of dusty shrubs, scrub pine, dogwood, hackberry.

Harry turned the engine off and climbed out of the car. He listened. The only sound that came to his ears was the thin, two-note cry of some bored or feebleminded bird.

Harry could not help himself. He stood on tiptoe and leaned forward. The paint had been burned away from the car’s roof, a black stain roughly two feet in circumference from which dark, twisting tentacles writhed (where the liquid acid had run across smooth metal, and trickled down the door panels).

“Oh, Jesus,” Harry whispered.

It was precisely what he thought he might see, and it shocked him.

He heard the voices then, over the rising tide of panic, and he distinctly heard Raymond’s laugh, and he looked up to see Raymond and the others coming down the road toward him.

Raymond—with Arbus perched flamboyantly on his shoulder—had his arm around Allan’s waist, and Rene clung to the boy’s arm.

“Ho,” Raymond shouted, “Lord Gainesborough! Thank Blodkin you are safe. We have convinced Allan that his private reservations must be overruled by common good. We are prepared to return to the black pond.”

“I S
UPPOSE
,” J
OHN
Story said, “you know what you are doing.” Ada Story could always tell when her husband was angry. He would become very formal in his manner, speak with elaborate care, as though she were mentally impaired. When he was especially angry, his hair would sprout wildly from the sides of his head, not from the anger itself, of course, but from a nervous and exasperated rubbing of his temples.

He crouched over the steering wheel, his jaw set determinedly, watching the empty interstate as though his life depended on his vigilance.

“Just what do you hope to accomplish by bringing it?” he asked.

Ada shrugged, realized that her husband was not looking at her, and spoke, “I don’t know. I just thought it might be useful if someone else understood about Raymond.”

“I suppose,” her husband began, “you’ve forgotten all those experts, all those folk who were after understanding Raymond, and the consequences of that.”

“John,” Ada said, stiffening a little as the inevitable conflict escalated, “I love you, but if you say ‘I suppose’ one more time, I won’t be responsible for my actions. I haven’t forgotten anything. And I don’t know…I just put it in the trunk. I just wanted to have it along. It’s that man Gainesborough’s story, you know, that’s where it came from, so I just thought… Oh I don’t know what I thought.” Ada found tears blurring her vision.

“Ada,” her husband said, “I only…”

“I probably won’t mention it,” Ada said. “We’ve just come to fetch our Raymond and his wife and his friends. Raymond is our affair and nobody else’s.”